Keynotes

The organizing committee is proud to announce that the SysMus08 main keynote speaker is Gerhard Widmer,  Professor and Head of the Department of Computational Perception at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, and Head of the Machine Learning, Data Mining, and Intelligent Music Processing Group at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI), Vienna.

We are also pleased to announce the two SysMus08 keynote speakers representing leading young researchers of systematic musicology:

Information on the selection process:

We initially planned to have four keynote speakers for our conference: three given by advanced PhD students or PostDocs who do not hold the position of a professor yet and one by an established researcher. Finally, we decided that there will be two keynotes given by young researchers and one main keynote given by a professor. The latter has been chosen and invited by the organizing committee.

The selection of young researchers as keynote speakers was based on a three step procedure since we wanted to guarentee a fair selection process:

1) List of candidates:
The members of the review committee were asked to provide the organizing committee with one name of a candidate (PhD student, PostDoc) who could give an interesting keynote at SysMus08. Their choice was based on the candidate’s outstanding CV (university education, number and quality of conference presentations, publications, etc.). They could suggest a candidate from their field or any other subfield of systematic musicology. The organizing committee decided on an additional list of names. The final list of candidates was based on suggestions from the review committee and the organizing committee. Werner Goebl was suggested by the review committee and Silke Borgstedt by the organizing committee.

2) Suggestions of candidates:
In a second step, the review committee received a list of 15 potential candidates and was asked to choose three candidates. Keynote speakers had to come from different subfields of systematic musicology and one of the three candidates had to be male and one female. 19 out of 25 members of the review committee participated in this step of the selection process.

3) Selection of candidates:
Based on the review committee’s suggestions, the organizing committee finally decided on who to invite. Only candidates within the top five rating were considered. We tried to make sure that keynote speakers are working in different fields of systematic musicology and that one is given by a female researcher.

We hope that attendants will appreciate that we tried to aim for a fair and transparent selection process!